El Salvador Part Two - Suchitoto and San Vicente

29/08/09-03/09/09

By far the nicest of all the places we visited in El Salvador was the small town of Suchitoto, an hour and a half´s bus ride from San Salvador. It is completely geared towards tourism with a plethora of hotels, bars and restaurants and yet it has still retained its charm with its cobbled streets, colonial architecture and friendly locals. On the day we went there, we think they were celebrating independence from Spain, (we don´t know for sure), but the main square was filled with people in uniform and several musicians, making for a great atmosphere. Half an hour´s walk from the centre is the Touristic Port Centre, where you can buy handicrafts from local artesans and enjoy a meal at one of the several restaurants, with a great view of Lake Suchitlán. They usually have boat rides around the lake, with the chance to visit a couple of islands, but it wasn´t possible for us to get a boat, as the lake had been invaded with plants. When we had first arrived I had thought that the lake was quite small, but that was because all the greenery I was seeing was in fact the lake, but the water was no longer visible :)

On our last day in El Salvador, we moved back to the first hotel we had stayed in at the Ticabus terminal and arranged tickets to Tapachula, Mexico for the following day. We then went to the small and rather uninteresting town of San Vicente, another hour and a half´s journey by bus. We had read somewhere that San Vicente had a museum with information about the civil war, which occurred here between 1980 and 1992, but after asking a couple of people where it was and being told that they hadn´t ever heard of a museum, we assumed that we must have been mistaken and so we just walked around for a while, visiting the two churches, neither of which were anything spectacular, and making a trip to the post office to send a postcard, which Vic had been carrying around since San Juan del Sur :)

Before making our way back to San Salvador we bought ice creams at a small shop and the owner kindly provided us with chairs so that we could rest for a while and enjoy them sitting down :) We obviously got chatting to him and found out that he was a teacher at one of the local schools. He also told us a bit about the war and how he fled San Vicente to avoid the fighting, first of all staying in the country but in the safety of the mountains, and then later fleeing completely to Costa Rica, where I assume he stayed until the war ended. A permanent problem in El Salvador is the amount of earthquakes that occur. In 2001 the small country experienced two severe earthquakes within one month of each other, the second one causing much damage to San Vicente, and which was followed by several aftershocks, at the time rendering it almost impossible to rebuild. Thankfully, San Vicente appears to have recovered since then.

Tomorrow (04/09) we´re off to Chiapas, the 8th biggest and most southern state of Mexico and we can´t wait. We´ll tell you all about it soon so keep reading :)